-
Why Your Brain Wants To Help One Child In Need — But Not Millions
NPR: Why do people sometimes give generously to a cause — and other times give nothing at all? That's a timely question, because humanitarian groups fighting the Ebola outbreak need donations from people in rich countries. But some groups say they're getting less money than they'd expect from donors despite all the news. Psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon has some answers that may surprise you. In one study, Slovic told volunteers about a young girl suffering from starvation and then measured how much the volunteers were willing to donate to help her.
-
Just Looking at Cash Makes People Selfish and Less Social
The Atlantic: When it comes to money, people aren’t pursuing stacks of green paper or a collection of copper disks—they’re interested in what those objects represent. The pull of money, the economy and most behavioral research agree, is symbolic. But what if the medium of exchange—cash itself—can change the way people behave? A study to be published next month in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology points toward that possibility. Its authors found, through a series of six experiments, that people who were prompted to think about money—literally just shown a picture of bills or coins—were more likely to conceal their emotions than those who viewed non-financial imagery.
-
We Are All Confident Idiots
Pacific Standard: Last March, during the enormous South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing. “People who go to music festivals pride themselves on knowing who the next acts are,” Kimmel said to his studio audience, “even if they don’t actually know who the new acts are.” So the host had his crew ask festival-goers for their thoughts about bands that don’t exist. “The big buzz on the street,” said one of Kimmel’s interviewers to a man wearing thick-framed glasses and a whimsical T-shirt, “is Contact Dermatitis.
-
Could Subliminal Messages Help Keep Seniors Healthy?
New York Magazine: Aging doesn’t occur in a vacuum. All sorts of factors ranging from genetic influence to support networks can alter what it means to get older and potentially face new, unfamiliar physical and emotional challenges. Andresearch has shown (PDF) that a big part of successfully adapting to these challenges is maintaining a positive attitude about the process.
-
Your OkCupid Self
The New York Times: Who are you when you’re online dating? Are you your real self, stripped of the pretenses you put on when you’re out in the world? Do you take those pretenses with you when you log on? Or do you perhaps construct new ones, unique to the medium? And what does the self you bring to a dating site say not just about you, but about the site itself? The philosopher Evan Selinger gets at some of these questions in his recent Los Angeles Review of Books review of “Dataclysm,” an exploration by Christian Rudder, an OkCupid co-founder, of his site’s trove of numbers. The book’s subtitle is “Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking),” and Mr.
-
The Most Undervalued Employee in Your Business
Inc.: Employees who tell it like it is without any concern for your feelings might get on your nerves a bit--but they are the most undervalued people in business. That's according to Adam Grant, author of the book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. Grant calls these kinds of people "disagreeable givers." "Disagreeable givers are the people who, on the surface, are rough and tough, but ultimately have others' best interests at heart," Grant said.
